1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique of recommending software process improvement, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for receiving process assessment results, analyzing correlations between findings, and providing recommendations for software process improvement, and a recording medium for recording the method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many software organizations perform Software Process Improvement (SPI) activities in order to achieve business objectives. SPI activities are performed typically in a cycle of current level assessment, improvement planning, improvement plan implementation, and monitoring. The current level assessment is an activity of understanding the difference between a software process implementation level of a software organization and a process reference model. Major software process reference models include the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in the U.S, International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) 15504 (also known as Software Process Improvement Capability Determination (SPICE)), and the Korean Software Process Certification Reference (also known as K-model). A process improvement plan is built based on the results of the current level assessment and a process is deployed and internalized by conducting the improvement plan and monitoring the plan conduction. The process improvement activities continue by repeating the process improvement cycle of assessment, planning, and plan conduction.
For continuous SPI, many companies periodically implement process assessment and thus plan process improvement. A process reassessment rate is increasing progressively. In this context, the importance of the quality of process improvement planning for successful SPI activities cannot be too much emphasized.
While process reference models and assessment methods have been actively standardized and studied and thus practice cases have been accumulated, studies are yet to be made on a systematic method for planning process improvement based on process assessment results and process planning is dominantly dependent on a process expert in the SPI field.
The following prior art documents include a process assessment method and a process improvement cycle guideline for a CMMI reference model. However, the prior art documents do not provide a technical means of systematically defining process improvement recommendations, taking into account strengths determined from software process assessment.